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Art and Activism

(Against Groys)

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Boris
Groys, philosopher and art theorist, has
recently published a text entitled ‘On Art Activism’ (e-flux)[1]
or ‘Kunstaktivismus’ in German (Lettre International)[2]in two reputable journals. In this text
he makes a claim that can only really be described as being totally false.

According
to Groys, contemporary art activism cannot hope for support from beyond the
arts, solely relying on its internal networks and the feeble financial help of
progressive cultural institutions. This situation of art activism, as Groys variously
emphasizes, is a new situation. Thus
according to him, it requires new theoretical reflection. He differentiates
this context from the Russian avantgardes of the october revolutions, which he
considers to have acted in accord with those in power (in the socialist state).
These avantgardes supposedly knew that power was on their side. He also refers
to the pro-fascist orientation of Italian futurism to support his argument. It
would seem that only someone ignorant of the history of artistic activism (art
activism or activism in art) would claim that its opposition to given
cofigurations of power is absolutely novel. They must be overlooking the entire
body of research and writing that addresses the theoretical connections between
engaged art production and social movements, too.

Now
we might simply confront Groys with an ABC of this research and literature –
literally beginning with Alberro (2003)[3],
followed by Bryan-Wilson (2009)[4],
Camnitzer (2007)[5], etc – but there are
indeed plenty of research assistants and interns that might take on this task.
The question is why Groys didn’t refer to them for such help. And there is
another important question: why do journals like e-flux and Lettre
International print a text that doesn’t meet the basic requirements of an essay
assignment (up to date with research)? The answer of course concerns the
cultural capital attached to the name Groys, which sweeps editor’s doors open.
But there also seems to be a structural thing within the art world that makes
it possible to claim just about anything.

Rather
than a list of literature we might of course present a counter-argument. This
is what I will briefly do below – not in order to claim superior knowledge, but
to do some justice to the issue. My aim is to problematise domains of discourse
and to figure out what I will tell my students when they come across Groys’
text and ask me about it. (This is why I won’t follow specific lines in his
argument but rather refute his basic premise.) We may identify three key
approaches to the different practices referred to as ‘art activism’ – a term which may itself be up for debate.
Across these three areas there are disciplinary overlaps – arts, sociology,
philosophy – as well as crossovers between different political positions.[6]

1. New standards (Thesis on ubiquity)

Some
approach the coincidence of art and activism, of cultural production and social
movements as an obvious thing. The boundary between the two is seen to be a
merely disciplinary one, a categorisation produced by academic viewpoints that
makes little difference in reality. Art as activism thus isn’t an exceptional
occurrence, and artistic activist as well as activist artists have been around
since the beginning of modernity, they’re all over. And they expanded their’
social and machinic creativity in the most diverse directions’[7]in the course of the last two centuries. The theses of Brian Holmes but
also of Paolo Virno and Jacques Rancière form part of those that take art and
activism to be obvious allies. They might not be allies that have explicitly
joined forces but they have a shared aim: both artistic avantgardes and radical
movements have sought ‘to explain that the old standards are no longer valid
and to look for what might be new standards.’[8] These
new standards are always seen as breaking with dominant norms and forms of
subjectivation, thus making them oppositional. When Rancière asks whether art
is resistant[9], his question is above all
a rhetorical one. This impulse to resist also exists within the biopolitical
conditions of the present. The ambivalence of such new standards, just as that
of ‘virtuosic work’[10]
emerging from the domain of art to then become a general social obligation, remains
a topic of heated debate.

We
must however ask when it is that those new standards will establish themselves
and prevail (not just as those of artists and activists). This question can
however barely be answered by the mentioned approaches. When we ask about the
conditions of possibility for such a process, we get to another question. If
art and activism are both concerned with structures of perception, wouldn’t
they need to be distinguished regarding their effectiveness (but also regarding
other effects of their reception)? Does the brushing and sweeping of a square
after the mayday protest march, as Beuys performed it with migrant students
(who remained nameless in art history), really play out on the same level as
the union-organised event itself? Can we describe and judge the practices of
the Situationist International and the Socialist International with the same
parameters?

2. Rifts (Thesis on
non-reconciliation)

Such
distinctions are made in approaches that are principally concerned with the
‘structurally conditioned rift’[11]
between the art field and movement practices. The departure point here is the
assumption that these domains function according to different principles: different
criteria determine success of failure, whether practices appear as legitimate
or inappropriate, and there are other forms, norms and dynamics. This approach
is represented by the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu, as well as by art
theorists such as Verena Krieger or philosophers like Juliane Rebentisch, who
have addressed these fundamental differences.

Krieger
considers ‘ambiguity’ to be the decisive ‘aesthetic norm’[12]
of modernity. She is clearly opposed to the univocality that political demands
need to embody. And with Rebentisch – even if her approach doesn’t at all
thematically focus on activism and radical movements – the mentioned opposition
expresses itself particularly when it comes to dealing with representation.
Whereas the political logic formulates its ‘representational logics notably as
a critique of the exclusion of the poor and oppressed’[13],
critical art is concerned with the rejection of clear representations. In this
view, critical art aims to ‘pointedly frustrate the referential deduction from
representation to the represented’[14].
This happens even at a time when art is said to generally lose its
limitatitons, when transgressions into other logics are no longer exceptional[15].
The question of when the political in art in fact works (as irony, as subversive
affirmation, as direct action…?) thus takes on weight in discussions.

The
black and white image series ‘before or after’ (2011) by Anetta Mona Chisa and
Lucia Tkácová nicely reflects on ambiguity and the question of representation.
It consists of historical photographs from different demonstrations within
feminist and women’s movement contexts. The placards and banners carried by
those in the pictures are covered with tape and new demands are written on
them, such as ‘coffee or milk’, ‘close or distant’, ‘subject or object’ as in
one particular image, or ‘like or dislike’, ‘never or ever’ in another.

If
art and social movements or political engagement function according to such
different logics, then why do they keep referencing each other and mixing? In
the end the question is if, and how, those structurally determined rifts can be
overcome.

3. Concatenation (Thesis on exception)

Finally
there are approaches that deal precisely with those possibilities of overcoming
the rifts. Here too there is the assumption that the logics of art and politics
‘seldom, if ever, perfectly coincide’[16].
That aside, it’s also clear that activists are always the minority in the art
field (and artists even more so in movements) – so much for the supposed
newness of depending on one’s own networks – and tend to not even be mentioned
as relevant actors by art-sociological studies. And yet – or maybe just because
of that – there is the question of the conditions und which a ‘concatenation
between art and revolution’[17]
can take place and how we may grasp its historical conjunctures. The closure of
spaces of political articulation (via repression) can trigger conjunctural high
points of concatenation (because it seems risky to express oneself
‘politically’ while it still seems fine to do so ‘artistically’), as was the
case in the 1970s in Latin America.[18]Or it is in turn strong social movements whose contents or motives become
attractive reference points for artists. And there are still quite a few other
reasons apart from these two.

During
the student protests against the neoliberalisation of higher education that
emerged from the academy of fine arts in Vienna in autumn 2009, and which
subsequently spread across the entire German speaking world, a banner hung from
the foyer of the academy. It said ‘What do you represent?’. Maybe this is where
those criteria of representation that Rebentisch considers to be so divergent
come together, in a mode of interrogation. On the one hand, as reference
internal to the art world, this question was an allusion to a work of Hannah
Wilke: a photograph in which the naked artist Wilke sits in the corner of a
gallery surrounded by toy pistols, carrying the inscription ‘What does this
represent? What do you represent?’ (1978-84). This work in turn refers to a
two-frame comic of Ad Reinhardt. In the comic’s first frame, a museum visitor
addresses the question ‘Ha ha, what does this represent?’ to an abstract
paining, while in the second frame the painting returns the question ‘What do
you represent?’ (1946). The banner at the art academy too involves all these
levels of representation. Because it of course also directly addressed every
visitor entering the academy, asking them about their position, about what one
stands for (representation) and whether this standpoint doesn’t maybe contain
an arrogant speaking on behalf of others (representation). A very political
question indeed.

The Aesthetic

So
the ‘new theoretical reflections’ that e-flux and Lettre International have
Groys call for in fact already exist. They just happen to be ignored in this
instance.

What
is at stake across all three cases – standards, rifts, concatenations – is
denouncing systematic injustice, calling on social structures and their
fracture. It’s not just that we should take artistic activism against the
domiant social order into account, starting from, say, Camille Pissarros
support for the Paris communards in 1871 up until the participation of Allan
Sekula in the protests against the World Trade Organisation in 1999. What’s
more is that these orders aren’t just envisaged as being institutionally and/or
organisationally formatted, but also come to be grasped as symbolic formations.
What has been registered and reflected theoretically and in activism since at
least the 1960s is that this level, the aesthetic, understood as
‘self-dynamizing sensual perception and affectivity’[19]
– as opposed to instrumentally rational and rule-driven forms of thought and
affectivity – is increasingly decisive within the social. The aesthetic is thus
always understood and addressed as an arena of relations of power and
dominance. It is in no way limited to a dichotomously functional level, where
it either beautifies (Design) or neutralises (Art) – as Groys agrues in his
article.